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Two recently published books provide intriguing and sometimes contradictory insights into the nature of consciousness. Mark Solms, neuropsychologist and leader of the neuropsychoanalysis movement, provides his view in The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness, while neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio continues his contributions in Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. The two books make for fascinating reading, and one can't help but feel enlightened and provoked by the obvious brilliance of both authors.
Solms takes up the ambitious task of attempting to solve what has been called the hard problem of consciousness. Simply stated, why and how is it that physical processes in the brain give rise to the phenomena of
Kevin Ing, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. Vedang Uttarwar, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California. Yama Akbari, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California. Theo G. M. van Erp, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California. Mark Fisher, School of Medicine, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California.
conscious experience? In other words: what is consciousness and why and how does it arise?
Solms begins by critiquing the cortical theory of consciousness. According to this view, the cerebral cortex is an essential component of consciousness, which incorporates the concepts of arousal and awareness; while the brainstem regulates arousal, awareness is thought to be primarily a cortical domain. In simple terms, normal waking life is characterized by both arousal (wakefulness) and awareness, coma has neither wakefulness nor awareness, the vegetative state exhibits wakefulness but not awareness, and the dreaming state is characterized by awareness without wakefulness. Solms argues that feeling is the primordial source of subjective, conscious experience, and that any origin story for consciousness must account for the centrality of affect. Unlike cortical